We can't give you replicator or transportor technology unless you join us. And when you finally get them, you will need our technical people to install them for you. Of course you will also need our energy source, comm system, etc. Can't pay us? No problem, we don't belive in material wealth. Just lets our crew have their R&R in your planet, setup bases in your system...
Hmm.. sounds a lot like Microsoft's "embrace and extend" ! It would be cool to see an "open source" alliance of worlds band together against the Federation... that would be a cool new series angle!
Maybe we should replace that Bill-Gates-of-Borg icon with one of Gates in a Federation Uniform?
if you look at the actual research page you'll get much more in-depth information about this, far more than the article.
The researchers say that all of the following are possible using off-the-shelf hardware:
Passive attacks to decrypt traffic based on statistical
analysis.
Active attack to inject new traffic from unauthorized mobile
stations, based on known plaintext.
Active attacks to decrypt traffic, based on tricking the access point.
Dictionary-building attack that, after analysis of about a day's
worth of traffic, allows real-time automated decryption of all traffic.
It only takes 5 hours to collect enough information to mount a statistical attack! They also describe both passive and active attacks that are possible in some detail. This isnt something to shrug off - even a passive attack is potentially very damaging. And it's not exotic hardware - you can get a lot of mileage just out of your consumer hardware.
There's also a draft of the paper available from the research group.
This is an extremely unsafe thing to implement. Anything that overrides your control of your vehicle could potentially make you lose control. What happens when youre driving along in a 45 zone and the zone changes suddenly to 30? if its raining or there's snow on the ground, you're toast. What security model will they use, to prevent malicious hacking (in this case, a virus could have tragic/fatal consequences).
Are they gonna have a live update of weather conditions at each and every zone as well? after all, weather affects speed limits. how will they correct for traffic conditions (sometimes, someone going the speed limit on a highway can actually cause a rush hour traffic jam). What about night vs. day limits? (they change in many places)
How will they resolve disputes like where the speed limit sign says one thing and the Central Database says another? How will they know how many people are in your car so as to know whether you should be in the HOV lane or not?
Will the argument, "I couldn't have been speeding, the guvnor was operating normally" be a legal defense? should it be?
And in the land of the rolling blackout, one has to wonder if the potential power saved could help the situation, assuming a good percentage of the big iron in Silicon Valley were configured to conserve what power it could (as opposed to adding on to the drain as it is now).
oh come on. California has huge heavy industries, gigantic metropolitan areas, teeming millions of people with personal computers, dishwashers, air conditioners, televisions... its a huge, populous, and industrial state. The impact of the Information Industry is still a minor fraction of the total costs. Even if you turned out the lights on Silicon Valley completely, California would still have a problem, because they haven't built enough new plants to supply the demand (of a huge, populous, industrial state).
If you had the exact same deregulation fiasco in Texas, or New York, or Illinois, you'd see the same thing, and there aren't Silicon Valleys of even comparable size in any of those states.
Is it just Geek Hubris to assume that our industry is the most important and central over all others? I see this same thing on reports on how our economy is supposedly tanking right now, just because of the NASDAQ. There's an entire world out there beyond our walled garden, you know..
its GOT to have subtitles. dubbing always takes the emotion out of it. language is part of the art - dubbing takes something out and fails to put it back in.
I got my speakers from Cambridge SoundWorks. They are a great company, and their speakers are high quality for much cheaper than the equivalent from Bose etc. it's worth reading up on their stuff...
Who decides what is accurate/moral? John Ashcroft, perhaps? Pat Buchanan? Corporate Lobbyists?
by extension, do you also support the restriction of information flow by the communist government of China?
How can any government agency simply cope with the massive amount of volume of information posted to the Net daily? or perhaps the Internet should be closed down to general public access/publishing?
Do you actually understand what the Internet actually is?
this proposal isn't a slippery slope. It's a frictionless Sarlacc pit.
actually, from the previews on TV, I wonder if the movie is trying to play on Microsoft sterotypes? Note that Tim Robbins has a distinctly Gates-ian wardrobe, haircut, and position as ultraCEO of a worldwide monopoly... also the premise of the movie is that a giant megacorp (monopoly) has fingers into every home and abuses that access. Also throw in some anti-Gates egomaniac accusations (imported from Larry Ellison), and of course a VERY suggestive name for the flick...
assuming this is correct, no wonder they use Gnome! I wonder if the producer/director/writers read Slashdot?
Who cares who owns the patent for advertising pop-up windows from an ISP? it's actually a fairly narrow application, limited to ISP's only. How does this affect the consumer? If an ISP tries to pass on to their customers the licensing fees for pop-ups they pay to NetZero, they'll get priced out of the super-competitive market - I mean, how much consumer loyalty is there really to ISP's anyway? *especially* the free ones?
in principle, patents can be abused. But this one doesn't seem too bad nor a misuse - we shoudln't have a knee-jerk reaction to patents infringement suits. Making undue noise about this will detract from our community's reasonable and justofied outrage over far more subversive/abusive patents elsewhere that we need to educate the public about. This patent with NetZero is just a red herring.
Maybe I'm swimming against the current here, but IMHO your company is absolutely correct. An employee is not a sovereign entity, every position involves responsibilities. And if your #1 IT dude is gone, then the entire landscape of your department has changed, and your company doesn't need or want an experienced #2 and a newbie #1. I think you're burying your head in the sand. Don't whine about dealing with "politics" etc - that's part of any position. Have you considered that this promotion would allow you to increase your skills, give you valuable experience, and even cooler, allow you to implement YOUR vision of what the IT department should look like? Do you have zero ambition, or are you just averse to responsibility and prefer to be a cubicle jockey forever?
sheesh man, I'm not your mom, but she'd tell you the same damn thing.
Note the following contact information: Jeffrey Lotspiech <lotspiech@almaden.ibm.com>. Is this the lead project engineer? If you feel like emailing him for information, BE POLITE. Also the presentation mentions someone named David Goldschlag, who may be able to shed more light.
The second link especially has lots of nice diagrams and information about data structures - possibly useful for constructing workarounds and educating people about what this is exactly. Highly worthwhile reading.
still no mention anywhere about SCSI... seems like a "safe" alternative? I'm ready to ditch IDE forever.
this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. highlight a word on any page, click the button, and presto! search results. PLUS it works with Netscape, IE, Opera, etc...
I was unbelievably psyched to see you landed the theme music gig for the new FOX show, Malcolm in the Middle. I'm definitely gonna go out and buy the soundtrack:)
my question is: How did you get the job? Was FOX looking for a band with a similarly "quirky" (sic.) or otherwise "subversive" theme? Did you have to audition, and if so, against who?:) And how has doing theme music for a TV show changed (if at all) things for you, in regards to artistic/creative license, merchandising, intellectual property, etc.?
True democracies are inherently flawed - that's why America is a Republic. The Electoral College insulates against the tyranny of the majority and also forces the government to be broader, instead of focusing on the needs of a few concentrated population centers. That's also why we have a Senate to balance the House.
If this guy really was inspired by the US Capitol, maybe he should set up a similar scheme, perhaps called the Electoral Coders? and what about a SeNet?
why not brute-force it? a independent database could be maintained of IP addresses, each of which has a geographic location associated. People who *want* to be found geographically would enter all teh IP's they want to allow others to track in the database themselves. anyone who doesnt want to be tracked geographically simply wouldn't bother entering their IP.
also many domain lookups correspond to actual companies - there shoudl be an easy way to parse WHOIS lookups and assign geography to those.
I don't think its feasible or even a good idea to get truly accurate automatic universal geographic lookups. The best compromise between privacy and the need for that info would be to associate a "home" address with a given IP. That way you know that Microsoft.com is in Redmond but you don't know for sure if billg@microsoft.com is sitting in Redmond or across the street.
While it's true that the entire election hinges on Florida right now, it's
incredibly interesting to note the role that Nader played in the margins.
these states below were considered "swing states" that really could make a
difference. consider how thin the margin was in each, compared to the total
votes Nader drew:
(# electoral votes - State - Gore's margin of victory/loss - Nader's total
vote)
=== in play ===
7 - Oregon (OR) - (-21,000) - 54,000
25 - Florida (FL) - (-1800) - 97,000
main points:
1. Nader wasn't a real threat in Pennsylvania, which was a critical state
for Gore. Gore won a decisive victory.
2. Nader almost cost Gore Wisconsin and Iowa - Gore's margins were so thin
there that he probably won only by "Green Guilt" (Nader voters thankfully
convinced that their vote for Nader was indeed a vote for Bush). Also, it is
VERY likely that "vote swapping" played a KEY role in the results from these
states, because the various swapping sites on the internet report a combined
total of ~10 - 15,000 participants.
3. Gore grabbed Washington and Michigan despite the Nader threat, a large
enough margin that Nader probably wasn't a real threat.
4. The three states that Gore lost which he had been counting on (TN, AR,
MO) were lost by large enough margins that even Nader's votes woudln't have
helped. Had Gore managed to win these states he woudl have not needed
Florida.
5. Oregon is being slightly spoiled, according to latest results. But Oregon
isn't as critical now since WA and MI went to Gore.
6. Florida is being HUGELY spoiled! look at the tiny margin - less than
2,000 votes - and compare it to Nader. This is also exactly how WI and IA
could have gone, except that even taken together they only have 18 votes and
FL has 25.
Assume that 40% of Nader votes were spoiled from Gore and 60% were not going
to vote for Gore anyway (these estimates are conservative, based on some
exit polling info on TV). Then in Florida, that means Gore could have had
(Nader votes x 40%) = (97,000 x.40) = ~35,000 votes. That's nearly *20
times* as many votes as the margin.
What does this all mean? It shows how close the election hinged. Gore could
have easily lost WI and IA as well, which would have cost him the election
right there. It's very possible that vote-swapping is what saved WI and IA
for Gore. Florida is still in play by the thinnest margin in history,
because of SEVERE Nader spoiling.
So, if Gore loses, it's because of Nader (who publicly promised to not
campaign in swing states, but broke his word). If Gore wins, it's
quite likely that it was won in WI and IA for him by vote-swappers:)
(data from MSNBC. conclusions and analysis from mybutt.com)
IMHO the database is useless. By trying to nail down IP addresses to geography they are trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. In 5 years I
bet the turnover rate of IP's will be 100%.
There certainly isn't anything wrong with the scanning. After all, IP addresses are a world resource, like Electromagnetic Frequency Spectrum. Surveying it doesn't infringe on anyone... and IMHO if an admin is so upset about a simple ping or traceroute bringing down their security wall, then they've got far bigger problems.
In a related note, Digital Convergence has issued cease-and-desist letters to all users of their intellectual property, "pencils" and "paper". The New York Times crosswords have been cancelled.
Digital Convergence's new RF-Paper scanners (the ":Cue:Dog:") have been reverse-engineered by sneaky Open Source hacktivists and used to fill out multiple-choice exams, do math problems, and even do artistic graphite rubbings. None of these uses were authorized by Digital Convergence and represent a violation of the EULA which is printed in invisible undetectable ink on every single page of paper.
Slashdot Mirror
no kidding! George was a guest star on ViP (with Pamela) this weekend, for god's sake.
er, I was just flipping channels, honest *cough cough*
Hmm.. sounds a lot like Microsoft's "embrace and extend" ! It would be cool to see an "open source" alliance of worlds band together against the Federation... that would be a cool new series angle!
Maybe we should replace that Bill-Gates-of-Borg icon with one of Gates in a Federation Uniform?
if you look at the actual research page you'll get much more in-depth information about this, far more than the article.
The researchers say that all of the following are possible using off-the-shelf hardware:
analysis.
stations, based on known plaintext.
worth of traffic, allows real-time automated decryption of all traffic.
It only takes 5 hours to collect enough information to mount a statistical attack! They also describe both passive and active attacks that are possible in some detail. This isnt something to shrug off - even a passive attack is potentially very damaging. And it's not exotic hardware - you can get a lot of mileage just out of your consumer hardware.
There's also a draft of the paper available from the research group.
This is an extremely unsafe thing to implement. Anything that overrides your control of your vehicle could potentially make you lose control. What happens when youre driving along in a 45 zone and the zone changes suddenly to 30? if its raining or there's snow on the ground, you're toast. What security model will they use, to prevent malicious hacking (in this case, a virus could have tragic/fatal consequences).
Are they gonna have a live update of weather conditions at each and every zone as well? after all, weather affects speed limits. how will they correct for traffic conditions (sometimes, someone going the speed limit on a highway can actually cause a rush hour traffic jam). What about night vs. day limits? (they change in many places)
How will they resolve disputes like where the speed limit sign says one thing and the Central Database says another? How will they know how many people are in your car so as to know whether you should be in the HOV lane or not?
Will the argument, "I couldn't have been speeding, the guvnor was operating normally" be a legal defense? should it be?
oh come on. California has huge heavy industries, gigantic metropolitan areas, teeming millions of people with personal computers, dishwashers, air conditioners, televisions... its a huge, populous, and industrial state. The impact of the Information Industry is still a minor fraction of the total costs. Even if you turned out the lights on Silicon Valley completely, California would still have a problem, because they haven't built enough new plants to supply the demand (of a huge, populous, industrial state).
If you had the exact same deregulation fiasco in Texas, or New York, or Illinois, you'd see the same thing, and there aren't Silicon Valleys of even comparable size in any of those states.
Is it just Geek Hubris to assume that our industry is the most important and central over all others? I see this same thing on reports on how our economy is supposedly tanking right now, just because of the NASDAQ. There's an entire world out there beyond our walled garden, you know..
its a theatrical release, isnt it?
its GOT to have subtitles. dubbing always takes the emotion out of it. language is part of the art - dubbing takes something out and fails to put it back in.
It's depressing that Slashdot would rather plug LAME, which in the end promotes a closed standard, over Vorbis, a fully independent and open one.
I got my speakers from Cambridge SoundWorks. They are a great company, and their speakers are high quality for much cheaper than the equivalent from Bose etc. it's worth reading up on their stuff...
this proposal isn't a slippery slope. It's a frictionless Sarlacc pit.
actually, from the previews on TV, I wonder if the movie is trying to play on Microsoft sterotypes? Note that Tim Robbins has a distinctly Gates-ian wardrobe, haircut, and position as ultraCEO of a worldwide monopoly... also the premise of the movie is that a giant megacorp (monopoly) has fingers into every home and abuses that access. Also throw in some anti-Gates egomaniac accusations (imported from Larry Ellison), and of course a VERY suggestive name for the flick...
assuming this is correct, no wonder they use Gnome! I wonder if the producer/director/writers read Slashdot?
If I understand teh X-Box correctly, it's state-of-the-art PC hardware sold at a loss by a Monopoly which intends to make money from licensing?
cool.
hack time! forget the I-opener! This puppy has real potential!
You should hire some lawyers. MIT might sue! Ever heard of Project Athena, you lusers?
Who cares who owns the patent for advertising pop-up windows from an ISP? it's actually a fairly narrow application, limited to ISP's only. How does this affect the consumer? If an ISP tries to pass on to their customers the licensing fees for pop-ups they pay to NetZero, they'll get priced out of the super-competitive market - I mean, how much consumer loyalty is there really to ISP's anyway? *especially* the free ones?
in principle, patents can be abused. But this one doesn't seem too bad nor a misuse - we shoudln't have a knee-jerk reaction to patents infringement suits. Making undue noise about this will detract from our community's reasonable and justofied outrage over far more subversive/abusive patents elsewhere that we need to educate the public about. This patent with NetZero is just a red herring.
Maybe I'm swimming against the current here, but IMHO your company is absolutely correct. An employee is not a sovereign entity, every position involves responsibilities. And if your #1 IT dude is gone, then the entire landscape of your department has changed, and your company doesn't need or want an experienced #2 and a newbie #1. I think you're burying your head in the sand. Don't whine about dealing with "politics" etc - that's part of any position. Have you considered that this promotion would allow you to increase your skills, give you valuable experience, and even cooler, allow you to implement YOUR vision of what the IT department should look like? Do you have zero ambition, or are you just averse to responsibility and prefer to be a cubicle jockey forever?
sheesh man, I'm not your mom, but she'd tell you the same damn thing.
there is a ton of information at T13.org. these links require a PDF reader:
Note the following contact information: Jeffrey Lotspiech <lotspiech@almaden.ibm.com>. Is this the lead project engineer? If you feel like emailing him for information, BE POLITE. Also the presentation mentions someone named David Goldschlag, who may be able to shed more light.
The second link especially has lots of nice diagrams and information about data structures - possibly useful for constructing workarounds and educating people about what this is exactly. Highly worthwhile reading.
still no mention anywhere about SCSI... seems like a "safe" alternative? I'm ready to ditch IDE forever.
I may have missed something, but isnt the SCSI interface independent of ATA? (highly possible I am flaming wrong here).
It would be great if they added PhP to the list of supported languages :)
forget the toolbar! for ease-of-use, check out the Google Browser Buttons
this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. highlight a word on any page, click the button, and presto! search results. PLUS it works with Netscape, IE, Opera, etc...
I was unbelievably psyched to see you landed the theme music gig for the new FOX show, Malcolm in the Middle. I'm definitely gonna go out and buy the soundtrack :)
my question is: How did you get the job? Was FOX looking for a band with a similarly "quirky" (sic.) or otherwise "subversive" theme? Did you have to audition, and if so, against who? :) And how has doing theme music for a TV show changed (if at all) things for you, in regards to artistic/creative license, merchandising, intellectual property, etc.?
True democracies are inherently flawed - that's why America is a Republic. The Electoral College insulates against the tyranny of the majority and also forces the government to be broader, instead of focusing on the needs of a few concentrated population centers. That's also why we have a Senate to balance the House.
If this guy really was inspired by the US Capitol, maybe he should set up a similar scheme, perhaps called the Electoral Coders? and what about a SeNet?
why not brute-force it? a independent database could be maintained of IP addresses, each of which has a geographic location associated. People who *want* to be found geographically would enter all teh IP's they want to allow others to track in the database themselves. anyone who doesnt want to be tracked geographically simply wouldn't bother entering their IP.
also many domain lookups correspond to actual companies - there shoudl be an easy way to parse WHOIS lookups and assign geography to those.
I don't think its feasible or even a good idea to get truly accurate automatic universal geographic lookups. The best compromise between privacy and the need for that info would be to associate a "home" address with a given IP. That way you know that Microsoft.com is in Redmond but you don't know for sure if billg@microsoft.com is sitting in Redmond or across the street.
While it's true that the entire election hinges on Florida right now, it's incredibly interesting to note the role that Nader played in the margins. these states below were considered "swing states" that really could make a difference. consider how thin the margin was in each, compared to the total votes Nader drew:
(# electoral votes - State - Gore's margin of victory/loss - Nader's total vote)
=== Gore Wins ===
23 - Pennsylvania (PN) - 196,000 - 102,000
11 - Wisconsin (WI) - 5,000 - 28,000
7 - Iowa (IA) - 4,000 - 28,000
11 - Washington (WA) - 89,000 - 69,000
18 - Michigan (MI) - 204,000 - 81,000
=== Gore loses ===
11 - Tennessee (TN) - (-79,000) - 20,000
6 - Arkansas (AR) - (-40,000) - 12,500
11 - Missouri (MO) - (-79,000) - 38,000
=== in play ===
7 - Oregon (OR) - (-21,000) - 54,000
25 - Florida (FL) - (-1800) - 97,000
main points:
1. Nader wasn't a real threat in Pennsylvania, which was a critical state for Gore. Gore won a decisive victory.
2. Nader almost cost Gore Wisconsin and Iowa - Gore's margins were so thin there that he probably won only by "Green Guilt" (Nader voters thankfully convinced that their vote for Nader was indeed a vote for Bush). Also, it is VERY likely that "vote swapping" played a KEY role in the results from these states, because the various swapping sites on the internet report a combined total of ~10 - 15,000 participants.
3. Gore grabbed Washington and Michigan despite the Nader threat, a large enough margin that Nader probably wasn't a real threat.
4. The three states that Gore lost which he had been counting on (TN, AR, MO) were lost by large enough margins that even Nader's votes woudln't have helped. Had Gore managed to win these states he woudl have not needed Florida.
5. Oregon is being slightly spoiled, according to latest results. But Oregon isn't as critical now since WA and MI went to Gore.
6. Florida is being HUGELY spoiled! look at the tiny margin - less than 2,000 votes - and compare it to Nader. This is also exactly how WI and IA could have gone, except that even taken together they only have 18 votes and FL has 25.
Assume that 40% of Nader votes were spoiled from Gore and 60% were not going to vote for Gore anyway (these estimates are conservative, based on some exit polling info on TV). Then in Florida, that means Gore could have had (Nader votes x 40%) = (97,000 x .40) = ~35,000 votes. That's nearly *20
times* as many votes as the margin.
What does this all mean? It shows how close the election hinged. Gore could have easily lost WI and IA as well, which would have cost him the election right there. It's very possible that vote-swapping is what saved WI and IA for Gore. Florida is still in play by the thinnest margin in history, because of SEVERE Nader spoiling.
So, if Gore loses, it's because of Nader (who publicly promised to not campaign in swing states, but broke his word). If Gore wins, it's quite likely that it was won in WI and IA for him by vote-swappers :)
(data from MSNBC. conclusions and analysis from mybutt.com)
ooh, another cool article from New York Times:
IMHO the database is useless. By trying to nail down IP addresses to geography they are trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. In 5 years I bet the turnover rate of IP's will be 100%.
There certainly isn't anything wrong with the scanning. After all, IP addresses are a world resource, like Electromagnetic Frequency Spectrum. Surveying it doesn't infringe on anyone... and IMHO if an admin is so upset about a simple ping or traceroute bringing down their security wall, then they've got far bigger problems.
In a related note, Digital Convergence has issued cease-and-desist letters to all users of their intellectual property, "pencils" and "paper". The New York Times crosswords have been cancelled.
Digital Convergence's new RF-Paper scanners (the ":Cue:Dog:") have been reverse-engineered by sneaky Open Source hacktivists and used to fill out multiple-choice exams, do math problems, and even do artistic graphite rubbings. None of these uses were authorized by Digital Convergence and represent a violation of the EULA which is printed in invisible undetectable ink on every single page of paper.